As part of a general effort to improve the effectiveness of our collaboration, the Management Board has discussed the structure of the ALICE Weeks and Mini Weeks. We agreed on a few small changes to the Mini Weeks, and rather substantial ones for the ALICE weeks.

During a period of four weeks every year (from 12.3 until 12.4 for 2014), more than 10 000 high school students in 40 countries get out of school for a day and go to a nearby University or research centre. There they spend a day of immersion in particle physics. They follow lectures on the physics of the elementary constituents of matter, on particle detectors and accelerators; they get “hands-on” experience by analysing real data from LHC experiments and perform measurements.

In the past few years, ALICE has published a wealth of scientific results deepening our understanding of the Quark Gluon Plasma and strong interactions and showing how exciting is the field of heavy-ion physics at the LHC. This is also reflected in the number of students who decide every year to pursue a career with ALICE and apply for a PhD. Recently seven of them successfully submitted their thesis following their research with ALICE.

On December 21 2013, Sabrakone, a sleepy remote village near Bishnupur in Bankura district of West Bengal, India, woke up to a heavy doze of science in a unique outreach programme organized by FREED, a non-Governmental organization under the aegis of Mr. Shyamaprosad Mukherjee, Minister In-charge, Ministry of Child Welfare, Government of West Bengal.

Last month a team of physicists and electronic engineers who are currently working on the development of the SAMPA chip visited CERN. The SAMPA chip is the common front-end read-out chip for the TPC and muon chambers (MCH) for the ALICE upgrade after LS2. The SAMPA chip is a collaborative project between Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic School of University (EPUSP) and Institute of Physics (IFUSP) at the University of São Paolo in Brazil, University of Bergen and University of Oslo.

Marta finished her MSc thesis at Utrecht University where she worked with the ALICE group on the study of charm quarks. During her master she realized that she was well fitted to the research environment and the field of heavy-ion physics seemed really exciting.

The ALICE-India Collaboration Meeting was hosted in VECC, Kolkata during 12-14 January 2014. The meeting was attended by close to seventy participants from Indian institutes and five special invitees from abroad.

High beam energies make the LHC the most energetic photon source ever built. Although the LHC was not primarily designed to study photon-hadron and photon-photon collisions, they occur in both pp and heavy-ion collisions.

A delegation from the ALICE experiment visited the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) on 11 March 2014; Paolo Giubellino, spokesperson of ALICE, Pierre Vande Vyvre, DAQ project leader and O2 co-project leader, and Barthélémy von Haller, DQM project leader and chairperson of CWG9. The main aim of their visit was to meet the members of a newly formed group, that will work on the data visualization system in ALICE, and to discuss future directions.

Kai Schweda replaces Peter Braun Munzinger as new member of the ALICE thesis award committee and will contribute on this important task in the life of the collaboration. We asked him about his previous career and his thoughts about his new role.

When did you decide to move to the field of heavy-ion physics and what is your particular field of research?

There are many fascinating and wondrous experiments and technology at CERN, some of which have literally redefined or changed our ways of viewing our universe and the laws that govern it. CERN has quickly become synonymous with prestige, power, ingenuity, intellect, and mystery, but many of our younger students and children are only familiar with it through what they see on television, whether through some scientific documentary or a comedy such as the Big Bang Theory. I am currently a high school teacher, and I have spent two summers working directly with the ALICE team under Dr.

Along the lines of his new book "The Higgs particle, the Liquid Universe and the Large Hadron Collider", Gerardo presents the ideas that motivate and give shape to the search of the origin of the Universe.

The ALICE collaboration has for the seventh time given awards to two of its doctoral students for their outstanding theses, in a ceremony that took place during the recent ALICE Week at CERN on 28 March.

The second Asia-Europe-Pacific School of High-Energy Physics, AEPSHEP2014, to be held in Puri, India, 4-17 November 2014, is open for applications (deadline 11 April 2014). AEPSHEP is held every second year, hosted in countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The first School in the series was held in Fukuoka, Japan in 2012.

During the last month, ALICE has published a wealth of scientific results deepening our understanding of the Quark Gluon Plasma and strong interactions and showing how exciting is the field of heavy-ion physics at the LHC. Recently four of them successfully submitted their thesis following their research with ALICE.